Wed Nov 4 13:08:43 2009

At 6 o'clock AM, Day of Thunder, 10th of the Month of the Great Evil
on the Theran calendar Strom perished, never to return.

I've lately been in this mode of "try everything you've not done in a long time"....hence the poisoner thief, the nexun conjurer, etc. So next on the list was a ranger but to even make it further complicated let's be an evil hunter! And a bedouin, that'll be fun!

Yeah, not doing that again. Probably ever.

It had it's moments of fun but in general the class is lacking in execution and I felt very "gimped" more often than not. At the end of this I'll kind of go over every ability and explain it out so people better understand why. Needless to say I now see why people don't play them.

Hopefully I was a fun person to fight and people enjoyed beating me around - I rarely took anything at all given that I didn't really use the gear. I was a Scion pledge but used unknowing Outlanders to rank and get me a bow in the draconian ruins which probably got me some bad looks but eh.... feel free to respond with some comments on how ya think I did. I made this guy to explore more but in the end I would have done better with just a warrior tank or anything else really. The wastes of nonveil and other wooded areas just don't have much to offer. I did find some neat things but nothing I couldn't get with another class.

So let's break down the hunter and bedouin abilities.

1. Sandswirl - you get vanish in the desert. Not exactly useful all the time but it could have it's uses. It'd be a lot cooler if it blinded people when you disappeared (like a certain ring).

2. Stash - never used it. Not really sure why you would ever use it unless you want to full loot and hide someone's stuff to be a ####.

3. Whirling simoon - the fact that this spell can do anything from a scratch to an obliterate sucks. Some normalcy on the damage would be nice - it also can blind/poison drinks/make thirsty but there are no echoes for it. So you have no idea when it did anything special, if anything since it can do none of them which is more often than not. It's two rounds of lag and in premise it's awesome but it'd be really nice if it at least had echoes to know what it did...especially if it blinds. Considering you can only use this in the desert I think it should get buffed in either damage normalizing or at least always land the effects. And I think it's only a 0 hour blind but I could be wrong.

4. Dervish Dance - this one I actually really like, kudos on making this very nice now. You'll hit each person fighting you 0-2 times (3 with the edge) and then feint everyone 0-2 times. Each strike you land takes 10 movement. Also the damage you do is a little above your normal damage. Not sure how it'd work with dual wield. I had fun posting a log of hitting 20-30 times on some elves....

5. General benefits - your dirt kicks in the desert are more painful and last 1 hour instead of 0 hours, you auto-dirt kick in the desert and your herbs are a lot better in the desert (300-350ish hp with a smaller cooldown). Endure heat is alright but you could easily prep around this. I thought it'd be nice against Maran but searing heat still felt painful enough. Oh and your staff/spear does searing heat (but not your bow).

So bedouin I kinda like, kinda don't. The amount of places you can fight in the desert is extremely limited and more often than not your opponent won't let you fight there. I could attack everyone in the desert in the Battlefield, Hamsah Outskirts, Araile Desert outside the nightwalker, etc....but they'd just either run somewhere else or you'd have to step out of the desert to fight (like at the nightwalker). And even in the desert I rarely could beat down other people. In the end I wouldn't do a bedouin again...too limited.

So the hunter....

1. Archery in general is niche - you tank just a little bit better but your damage sucks. Never got ahold of the bracers of archery (damn you Sulye!)...having dervish dance was fun to use with archery but it was a gimic and nothing too useful beyond that. I did kill some things I think would have been difficult without a bow but not by much considering you lose the damage/healing output of other options. Out of the woods it's just as bad as you would expect - considering a sword/shield was relatively the same from what I experienced. Also no matter how well you tank, you can't dodge the direct damage like drum, artery, druids, etc. So you're pretty much hoping that they don't figure it out - Sulye eventually did and just would spam serpent strike on me and I'd lose every time.

2. Flaming arrow and poison arrow, how I hate and love thee....even perfected the chances these land are horrible. I've got a log of this failing about twelve times on a single person. It's not like it's overpowered to "scratch" someone a few times for 3 hours. These should always land in my opinion if you at least hit the arrow but right now you have to land the arrow and fight the random generator. Bleh. Made killing some mobs easier but that's about it.

3. Aimed shot was a big letdown. I fought with 40-60 hitroll pretty much all the time and even perfected it hardly landed right - especially head shots. And when it did, I even more rarely got the echo for -2 to a stat. It's stackable but if your opponent is sitting there long enough to get screwed by getting -2 every round then they're retarded. The torso shot is 1-2 round of lag (like trip, never enough to fully lag). I was hoping the echo would do something cool like hack arm/leg but nope... oh and a headshot echo will "muddle" for like two hours.

4. Bait - pretty pointless in my opinion. It's a two-hit feint to only what you're fighting, only in the woods. Dervish dance quickly made this obsolete and even perfected it wouldn't always work. If it worked outside of the woods or feinted everyone it'd be more worth it.

5. Aerial shot - talk about lackluster...all this did was piss off air shifters. They land somewhere randomnly in the area (not at your feet), they take a DEMOLISH usually without any protections, they get zero lag, and get earthbind for 3 hours or so. Oh and it doesn't knock druids out of the air (*cough* crap *cough*). So yeah, if you somehow miraculously get an air shifter low enough and they fly upward it's just another call lightning. But considering they can just revert;word instantly since there's no lag it's kind of "bleh". Neat but nothing to write home about. Someone told me they could die from it but considering I shot down this about twenty times I never saw nothing special.

6. Fashionbow/imbue weapon - I'm sorry but this is just wrong how bad these are. At hero levels I think I made a level 21 average bow with +6/+6....no damage or healing echoes. And they're heavy. You can walk to balator and BUY a better bow until the hero ranks where you should be able to find another bow. This really should be changed to at least allow healing (side note: evil hunters are screwed. Goodies have a lot of options above average 22 with neat things like cursed/wrath/magic/etc that you can all get alone. Evil hunters only have bows in explore areas that you could never get solo...and that's it. The next highest bow I found I could get solo was average 22 and I found about twenty bows).

7. Serpent strike changes - yeah it's kinda neat but it wasn't exactly reliable for me. Considering I had 24 dex, 21 int, and perfected weapons and serpent strike, you would think it would land more. Fighting an AP once I think I serpent striked with a whip 2-3 times and it never landed before he just fled. The only one of real use is the whip which deafens. Here's the list..

Staff - 1-2 dex
Spear - 3 hour bleed
Sword - ?
Dagger - 1-2 str
Whip - Deafen

8. Timed attack - the pinnacle of the hunter guild and man it couldn't be a bigger letdown. When you first use it and see that DEVASTATE you're thinking "this is great!" but then the realization of the mechanics kick in and you're wondering why use this. So here's the basics of timed attack - it's three rounds of lag where you "pull back" and do no combat damage, where at the end you can land the attack. Think of it like an extended flank attack. Also, any kind of lag at all makes it fail. That means if your opponent realizes "hey, he's not hitting me...must be doing a timed attack....BASH!" then you're suddenly in 3-5 rounds of lag with nothing coming to save you. That's right...if you want to stop any timed attack, just lag them somehow - even one round will cancel it. Also that DEVASTATE isn't so hot when you realize you're missing three entire rounds of combat damage - assuming you're geared like I was (heavy hit, low damage) and hitting 2-3 MASSACRES a round....that's 6-9 MASSACRES you missed out on for that DEVASTATE. Oh and even better - since you're not attacking at all for three rounds, you don't get any heal/damage from your ranger spear/staff. The effects? Here ya go.

Dagger - -6 str, 6 hour bleed
Sword - -8 str for 8 hour
Staff - -8 int for 8 hour
Spear - -6 str, 6 hour bleed
Whip - Flurry damage, each lash is -2 dex/str for 5 hours (stacks...usually see 2-4)

So yeah, if you make them drop something it's neat but you just sacrificed 4 rounds (oh did I mention you have 1 round lag after it?) of all your combat damage and ability to land a half-assed boneshatter or impale. "But you can stack them all!" Yeah, good luck with that....considering it takes 8 rounds just to land two of them, in which your opponent doesn't lag you at all...you have fun with that.

9. Observe and stalker - observe I've got mixed feelings about. It's just like martial stance in a lot of ways where you need to be hiding to observe and the more you stack the better you do in combat. I got up to eight or nine once and never saw anything revolutionary. I don't think it helps at all with them missing commands so that impale/boneshatter will still ruin your day. I never "pounced", saw increased damage or anything else so don't revolve your day around it. Stalker of the wilds seemed completely pointless to me - you can follow someone who has nofollow on....um, that's good? Seriously, you're taking away observe for follow? I thought it might let me follow after combat but any combat removes the effect and I after using it a few times I saw nothing special at all. If you can't follow someone in the woods yourself, you've got problems.

10. General benefits - as a hunter you can see people sneaking. You'll notice a disturbance in the sand or equivalent in any terrain when someone walks in or out...if you can see them. Kinda nice.

So yeah, that's my take on hunters. I killed a few but more often than not I got killed and just kinda got tired of it. Timed attack was a huge letdown and archery wasn't nearly as good out of the woods as I thought it would be so the experiment quickly ended. If I ever fathomed doing a hunter again I would either do a mariner and harass people on the water (which kinda sucks now that no cabal is water located) or I'd beg an Immortal to give me "civilized" hometerrain. Since neither will likely happen, doubt I'll be returning to the class.

Hope you all enjoyed him - thanks.

"Sand" Torak

Just a couple random comments:

- I think Whirling Simoon is better than you do, but I agree that more echoes to the caster explaining what's happening would help it a lot. I'll try and add that to my list.

- The thing I think you're at least partly missing with respect to archery is how it stacks up or doesn't stack up vs. different opponents. For example, against an opponent that parries pretty decently but can't dodge at all, I think archery looks a lot better than against an opponent who dodges great but doesn't parry much or at all.

I think some people (not you, specifically) pick hunter thinking that archery will be the best option 24/7 and it's really not meant to be -- I think it's a good/interesting option in some cases, and loses out to other options you have in other cases.

Whirling simoon does have a cool factor, but echoes would be nice. When I saw it scratch an earth elemental though that was kinda ridiculous and then it OBLITERATE it two rounds later. Less random would be nice. Nothing I think is overboard considering it can only be used in deserts.

Timed attack really, really needs some looking over. Four rounds of lag, 3 rounds without any combat damage, canceled at any time by any lag, for a single boneshatter or impale at half power.....just not really seeing a practical use for this. Sure you can do it for different effects on different weapons but since the effect is low, you need to "stack" to get any benefit. We're talking 8 rounds just to get a weak -8/-8 boneshatter.

When ya look at your options besides the bow (which still do bad against someone like Fulgrum, who doesn't dodge...I've got more than a few logs of him kicking my ass), it's really not worth it to use them. Unless I'm going to spam serpent strike for the effects, in which case they'll just run.

I'm not saying a hunter was horrible at surviving, it's just horrible at "hunting" But any ranger is good at surviving, you only die if you overextend.

ennn teee saruk.

The things he mentioned were tweaked upward. I share the same experience with hunters ranging from Storm-giants to arials.

Archery is good, but the bow skills tend to be meh.

...it'd be nice if you could improve archery on defending, NOT just the attacks. It makes getting archery up a huge pain, especially until you get rapid shot.

Rank 25.

I didn't have any problem with archery. I got it at level 15 and shortly thereafter it was 100. It was mastered long before rapid shot. Definitely before level 20. Now parry on the other hand will not seem to go up at all for me. Yes, I know it doesn't work with a bow.. I mean with all other weapons.

Yeah. I wouldn't play that build either.

Re: bracers. After you basically told me, "Yeah, I'm attacking you as soon as I'm in your PK," I thought maybe you were Kaskin/Theollas back for Archer #3. Mainly because he did the same thing: challenge me for them. And this was an Outlander. Which was pretty cool, actually, so style points go to Kaskin.

Anyways, I get that they're good for archers, but honestly I haven't been able to find (or keep) anything better for myself. So I wasn't going to give them up unless you had something good to trade. They're not unique, so I'm surprised you couldn't find a second pair.

Also- I wasn't coordinating with that other guy who jumped in on our fight, despite him apparently being an Outlander pledge. (Who knew? Not me!) But I wasn't going to turn down the help once he showed up.